Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs) are often used to resuscitate people during cardiac arrest incidents including life-threatening cardiac dysrhythmias, ventricular fibrillation, and pulseless ventricular tachycardia. Each of these cardiac incidents involves abnormal, electrical impulse conduction in the cardiac muscle, which in turn results in abnormal heart rhythms that may lead to damaged cardiac muscle and potentially death. To reduce the adverse effects and/or to end these incidents, defibrillation therapy, which includes delivering therapeutic doses of electrical current with a defibrillation device to the cardiac muscle thereby potentially restoring normal heart rhythm.
Numerous different types of defibrillator devices exist such as external, transvenous, or implanted defibrillator devices. For example, pacemakers are implantable devices used to treat people with chronic arrhythmias by constantly or intermittently applying compensatory and corrective electrical impulses to maintain proper cardiac rhythm. These compensatory and corrective electrical impulses thereby potentially reduce occurrence of cardiac arrest events and potentially prolong a person's life. While pacemakers are designed for patients having predictable, chronic cardiac arrhythmias, most cardiac arrests associated with life-threatening cardiac dysrhythmias, ventricular fibrillation, and pulseless ventricular tachycardia occur spontaneously. Therefore, specific AED devices were designed to further treat these spontaneous cardiac arrests.
Over the past four decades, it has become common place to include AED devices in various public and common areas having high volume pedestrian traffic to potentially combat the deleterious effects of the above mentioned spontaneous cardiac arrest incidents. Also, due to the complex and highly sensitive circuitry within these AED devices, these AED devices are sometimes placed within various types of storage cabinets to protect the AED devices until needed and to further ensure proper AED operation while in use. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,301,501 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,735,473 disclose exemplary, conventional AED storage cabinets. In order to notify others of someone potentially experiencing a cardiac arrest incident, most conventional cabinets are equipped with door triggered alarms that are activated and immediately sound (and/or provide a visual alarm) upon opening the cabinet door regardless of the presence of the AED device inside the cabinet.
Most conventional storage cabinets utilize an activation switch and alarm that is in operative relation relative to its door and a wall. More specifically, certain devices utilize a pressure switch operatively connected to a circuit that controls an alarm that is immediately activated upon door opening. In these exemplary devices, the pressure switch remains open as long as there is adequate pressure on the switch, which may be applied, for example, as long as the door is closed. However, when the storage cabinet door opens, pressure on the switch is released and the switch is closed, thus, automatically activating the alarm regardless of whether the AED device has been removed from the cabinet.
Although the above mentioned conventional AED storage cabinets function to store AED devices, many problems currently exist with these conventional cabinets. For example, cabinets having these “cover triggered” or “pressure triggered” alarms, which are operatively linked to door movement, are prone to generate false alarms. These false alarms may be generated when, for example, people accidentally bump into or make incidental contact with the storage device's door thereby partially or completely opening the door, which simultaneously activates the alarm. These false alarms create a general state of panic for those around the AED storage cabinet, and in some instances, medical providers (e.g., ambulances and emergency medical technicians) are unnecessarily alerted and called to the scene of the false alarm. Thus, these false alarms further waste healthcare provider's time and resources.
To potentially avoid these false alarms, many conventional AED storage cabinets have been further equipped with locking mechanisms (e.g., a lock and key mechanism) provided in the door that rely on keys for entry in to the cabinet's interior. However, a major drawback of including a lock and key mechanism in an AED storage cabinet is that the key must be readily accessible to unlock the door and access the AED device if someone is experiencing a cardiac arrest incident. Thus, even though a lock and key mechanism may decrease false alarms, these lock and key configurations often lead to decreased response times for treating cardiac arrest incidents.